Baseball’s code will deal with the miscreants

Other laws ban public drinking and loud music. You cannot overturn cars or loot stores when your team wins a championship.

Besides the important stuff, governments keep laws banning all sorts of excessive celebrations.

Organized sports, as the name implies, also are eternally vigilant against acts considered to be taunting.

Football regulates end zone celebrations. Basketball has banned the “cutthroat” gesture.

Baseball’s rulebook, while comprehensive about game play, is notoriously silent on this topic.

Enter the unwritten rules of baseball, which are meant to fill the void.

It’s simple. A batter who hits a homer should neither flip the bat nor should he stare at the ball in flight. He’s not supposed to slowly round the bases, either. His teammates should stay in the dugout rather than spilling onto the field to celebrate.

If a player does does any of that, baseball’s unwritten code dictates swift retaliation. The opposing pitcher becomes judge, jury and executioner. He metes out justice — in the form of a fastball in the ear or to the ribs — to either the offending batter or the next batter.

Giving up a home run is humiliating enough for a pitcher, this argument goes. Bat flipping or gesturing are considered taunting, as are over-the-top celebrations by teammates.

As barbaric as it seems, the system works. Sure, the pitcher gets thrown out of the game, but the message is always sent and received.

That, however, hasn’t stopped the pointless annual discussion about young players who don’t respect the game.

Hall of Famer Goose Gossage got spring training off to a rousing start last week by expressing his frustration over some disturbing trends from last season. Bat flipping was on the rise, with Toronto right fielder Jose Bautista being a major practitioner.

“Joey Bats” famously flipped his bat after hitting a clutch homer in last seasons playoff series against Texas.

“Bautista is a (bleeping) disgrace to the game,” Gossage told ESPN in profanity-laden tirade. “He’s embarrassing to all the Latin players, whoever played before him. Throwing his bat and acting like a fool, like all those guys in Toronto.”

“Baseball’s tired,” he told the magazine in the most recent issue. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself…I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair.”

Erik Sherman, a baseball historian whose book “KINGS OF QUEENS: Life Beyond Baseball with the ’86 Mets” comes out March 22, agrees with Gossage, adding that post-game celebrations have gotten out of hand.

“These guys go absolutely berserk after a game-winning home run,” Sherman told me Saturday. “They’re pouring water on each other. They’re chasing the guy down the baselines. It’s gotten out of hand.”

The problem, Sherman said, is overkill.

“Do that stuff in the postseason, or in a regular-season game where you were 15 games out and came all of the way back,” Sherman continued. “But don’t do it on April 30. It’s when you celebrate like that all of the time, it diminishes the big moments.”

This beef mirrors the generational gap that’s always existed in every society. It never goes away. The gap pits a young generation’s arrogance and naïveté against an older generation’s collective amnesia as well as their diminished ability to recognize irony.

Complaining about the kids does nothing.

In life, these things work themselves out with time. Young people become older, more thoughtful and more sedate.

Baseball doesn’t need a clock. It has the code.

Ergo, yammering about player celebrations is pointless. Gossage and others of his ilk are wasting everyone’s time.